THE “REVOLUTION” AT VAN
The Turkish province of Van lies in the remote north-eastern corner of
Asia Minor; it touches the frontiers of Persia on the east and its
northern boundary looks toward the Caucasus. It is one of the most
beautiful and most fruitful parts of the Turkish Empire and one of the
richest in historical associations. The city of Van, which is capital of
the vilayet, lies on the eastern shores of the lake of the same name; it
is the one large town in Asia in which the Armenian population is larger
than the Moslem. In the fall of 1914, its population of about 30,000
people represented one of the most peaceful, happy, and prosperous
communities in the Turkish Empire. Though Van, like practically every
other section where Armenians lived, had had its periods of oppression
and massacre, yet the Moslem yoke, comparatively speaking, rested upon
its people rather lightly. Its Turkish Governor, Tahsin Pasha, was one
of the more enlightened type of Turkish officials. Relations between the
Armenians, who lived in the better section of the city, and the Turks
and the Kurds, who occupied the mud huts in the Moslem quarter, had been
tolerably agreeable for many years.
The location of this vilayet, however, inevitably made it the scene of
military operations, and made the activities of its Armenian population
a matter of daily suspicion. Should Russia attempt an invasion of Turkey
one of the most accessible routes lay through this province. The war had
not gone far when causes of irritation arose. The requisitions of army
supplies fell far more heavily upon the Christian than upon the
Mohammedan elements in Van, just as they did in every other part of
Turkey. The Armenians had to stand quietly by while the Turkish officers
appropriated all their cattle, all their wheat, and all their goods of
every kind, giving them only worthless pieces of paper in exchange.
The attempt at general disarmament that took place also aroused their
apprehensions, which were increased by the brutal treatment visited upon
Armenian soldiers in the Caucasus. On the other hand, the Turks made
many charges against the Christian population, and, in fact, they
attributed to them the larger share of the blame for the reverses which
the Turkish Armies had suffered in the Caucasus. The fact that a
considerable element in the Russian forces was composed of Armenians
aroused their unbridled wrath. Since about half the Armenians in the
world inhabit the Russian provinces in the Caucasus, and are liable,
like all Russians, to military service, there was certainly no
legitimate grounds for complaint, so far as these Armenian levies were
_bona fide_ subjects of the Tsar. But the Turks asserted that large
numbers of Armenian soldiers in Van and other of their Armenian
provinces deserted, crossed the border, and joined the Russian Army,
where their knowledge of roads and the terrain was an important factor
in the Russian victories. Though the exact facts are not yet
ascertained, it seems not unlikely that such desertions, perhaps a few
hundred, did take place.
At the beginning of the war Turkish officials appeared in this
neighbourhood and appealed to the Armenian leaders to go into Russian
Armenia and attempt to start revolutions against the Russian Government,
and the fact that the Ottoman Armenians refused to do this contributed
further to the prevailing irritation. The Turkish Government has made
much of the “treasonable” behaviour of the Armenians of Van, and have
even urged it as an excuse for their subsequent treatment of the whole
race. Their attitude illustrates once more the perversity of the Turkish
mind. After massacring hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the course
of thirty years, outraging the women and girls, and robbing and
maltreating them in every conceivable way, the Turks still apparently
believed that they had the right to expect from them the most
enthusiastic “loyalty.” That the Armenians all over Turkey sympathised
with the Entente was no secret. “If you want to know how the war is
going,” remarked a humorous Turkish newspaper, “all you need to do is to
look in the face of an Armenian. If he is smiling, then the Allies are
winning; if he is downcast, then the Germans are successful.” If an
Ottoman Armenian soldier should desert and join the Russians that would
unquestionably constitute a technical crime against the State, and might
be punished without violating the rules of all civilised countries. Only
the Turkish mind, however--and possibly the German--could regard it as
furnishing an excuse for the terrible barbarities that now took place.
Though the air all during the autumn and winter of 1914-15 was filled
with premonitions of trouble, the Armenians behaved with remarkable
self-restraint. For years it had been the Turkish policy to provoke the
Christian population into committing overt acts, and then seizing upon
such misbehaviour as an excuse for massacres. The Armenian clergy and
political leaders saw many evidences that the Turks were now up to their
old tactics, and they therefore went among the people, cautioning them
to keep quiet, to bear all insults, and even outrages, patiently, so as
not to give the Moslems the opening which they were seeking. “Even
though they burn a few of our villages,” these leaders would say, “do
not retaliate, for it is better that a few be destroyed than that the
whole nation be massacred.”
When the war started, the Central Government recalled Tahsin Pasha, the
conciliatory Governor of Van, and replaced him with Djevdet Bey, a
brother-in-law of Enver Pasha. This act in itself was most disquieting.
Turkish officialdom has always contained a minority of men who do not
believe in massacres as a State policy and who cannot be depended upon
to carry out strictly the most bloody orders of the Central Government.
Whenever massacres have been planned, therefore, it has been customary
first to remove such “untrustworthy” public servants and replace them
with men who are regarded as more reliable. The character of Tahsin’s
successor made his displacement still more alarming. Djevdet had spent
the larger part of his life at Van; he was a man of unstable character,
friendly to non-Moslems one moment, hostile the next, hypocritical,
treacherous, and ferocious according to the worst traditions of his
race. He hated the Armenians and cordially sympathised with the
long-established Turkish plan of solving the Armenian problem. There is
little question that he came to Van with definite instructions to
exterminate all Armenians in this province, but for the first few months
conditions did not facilitate such operations. Djevdet himself was
absent fighting the Russians in the Caucasus, and the near approach of
the enemy made it a wise policy for the Turks to refrain from
maltreating the Armenians of Van. But early in the spring the Russians
temporarily retreated.
It is generally recognised as good military tactics for a victorious
army to follow up the retreating enemy. In the eyes of the Turkish
generals, however, the withdrawal of the Russians was a happy turn of
war mainly because it deprived the Armenians of their protectors and
left them at the mercies of the Turkish Army. Instead of following the
retreating foe, therefore, the Turks’ Army turned aside and invaded
their own territory of Van. Instead of fighting the trained Russian Army
of men, they turned their rifles, machine guns, and other weapons upon
the Armenian women, children, and old men in the villages of Van.
Following their usual custom, they distributed the most beautiful
Armenian women among the Moslems, sacked and burned the Armenian
villages, and massacred uninterruptedly for days. On April 15th about
500 young Armenian men of Akantz were mustered to hear an order of the
Sultan; at sunset they were marched outside the town and every man shot
in cold blood. This procedure was repeated in about eighty Armenian
villages in the district north of Lake Van, and in three days 24,000
Armenians were murdered in this atrocious fashion.
A single episode illustrates the unspeakable depravity of Turkish
methods. A conflict having broken out at Shadak, Djevdet Bey, who had
meanwhile returned to Van, asked four of the leading Armenian citizens
to go to this town and attempt to quiet the multitude. These men made
the trip, stopping at all Armenian villages along the way, urging
everybody to keep public order. After completing their work these four
Armenians were murdered in a Kurdish village.
And so when Djevdet Bey, on his return to his official post, demanded
that Van furnish him immediately 4,000 soldiers, the people were
naturally in no mood to accede to his request. When we consider what had
happened before, and what happened subsequently, there remains little
doubt concerning the purpose which underlay this demand. Djevdet, acting
in obedience to orders from Constantinople, was preparing to wipe out
the whole population, and his purpose in calling for 4,000 able-bodied
men was merely to massacre them, so that the rest of the Armenians might
have no defenders. The Armenians, parleying to gain time, offered to
furnish 500 soldiers and to pay exemption money for the rest. Now,
however, Djevdet began to talk aloud about “rebellion,” and his
determination to “crush” it at any cost. “If the rebels fire a single
shot,” he declared, “I shall kill every Christian man, woman, and child
up to here,” pointing to his knee.
For some time the Turks had been constructing entrenchments around the
Armenian quarter and filling them with soldiers, and, in response to
this provocation, the Armenians began to make preparations for a
defence. On April 20th a band of Turkish soldiers seized several
Armenian women who were entering the city; a couple of Armenians ran to
their assistance and were shot dead. The Turks now opened fire on the
Armenian quarters with rifles and artillery; soon a large part of the
town was in flames and a regular siege had started. The whole Armenian
fighting force consisted of only 1,500 men; they had only 300 rifles and
a most inadequate supply of ammunition, while Djevdet had an army of
5,000 men, completely equipped and supplied; yet the Armenians fought
with the utmost heroism and skill. They had little chance of holding off
their enemies indefinitely, yet they knew that a Russian Army was
fighting its way to Van, and their utmost hope was that they would be
able to defy the besiegers until these Russians arrived.
As I am not writing the story of sieges and battles, I cannot describe
in detail the numerous acts of individual heroism, the co-operation of
the Armenian women, the ardour and energy of the Armenian children, the
self-sacrificing zeal of the American missionaries--especially Dr. Usher
and his wife and Miss Grace H. Knapp--and the thousand other
circumstances that make this terrible month one of the most glorious
pages in modern Armenian history. The wonderful thing about it is that
the Armenians triumphed. After nearly five weeks of sleepless fighting,
the Russian Army suddenly appeared, and the Turks fled into the
surrounding country, where they found appeasement for their anger by
again massacring unprotected Armenian villages. Dr. Usher, the American
medical missionary, whose hospital at Van was destroyed by bombardment,
is authority for the statement that, after driving off the Turks, the
Russians began to collect and to cremate the bodies of Armenians who had
been murdered in the province, with the result that 55,000 bodies were
burned.
I have told this story of the “revolution” in Van not only because it
marked the first stage in this organised attempt to wipe out a whole
nation, but because these events are always brought forward by the Turks
as a justification of their subsequent crimes. As I shall relate, Enver,
Talaat, and the rest, when I appealed to them on behalf of the
Armenians, invariably instanced the “revolutionists” of Van as a sample
of Armenian treachery. The famous “revolution,” as this recital shows,
was merely the determination of the Armenians to save their women’s
honour and their own lives, after the Turks, by massacring thousands of
their neighbours, had shown them the fate that awaited them.